Co-Occurring Intimate Partner Violence and Child Maltreatment: Local Policies/Practices and Relationships to Child Placement, Family Services and Residence

Abstract

Family violence, and particularly co-occurring domestic violence and child maltreatment, are common and complex, often frustrating both child welfare agencies and domestic violence service organizations in their efforts to care for children and adult victims, respectively. The Family Violence Services Study (FVSS) is a project to collect detailed, contextual data at the state and local levels on the organization and relationship of child welfare services for children, and domestic violence services for women when these problems co-occur. Although previous research has found a high rate of co-occurring domestic violence and child maltreatment in the child welfare system, little systematic research on a national scale is available about state and local policies and practices related to these families. This current project is a supplemental study of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), a national probability study of more than 5,000 children and adolescents ages 0-14 investigated as victims of child abuse and neglect. The NSCAW study contains detailed information on child development, functioning and symptoms, services, environment and placement over a 36-month period along with domestic violence and maternal characteristics and services. The FVSS uses the same sample as NSCAW to survey child welfare services (CWS) and domestic violence service (DVS) agencies, and will study service system responses through both the survey data and the new contextual information. The FVSS investigative team documented strikingly high rates of cooccurring family violence in their national sample of families referred for suspected abuse or neglect, frequent persistence of some types of domestic violence and child maltreatment, wide variation in service delivery to families with co-occurrence, wide variation in practices and policies at the county level of managing families with co-occurrence, and several important opportunities to improve care for affected families. For example, we conclude that increasing and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.services for these families in need contributes to the challenge of identifying best practices and offering any improvements to existing policies and procedures. ResultsThe results of the FVSS analyses to date are presented in a number of manuscripts that are mostly published or under review. A few are in preparation. All are listed below.Published

Intimate partner violence against women in Spain: A medico-legal and criminological study

“…Alcohol or drugs were involved in the incident in 42.4% (n= 247) of cases. Most of abusive incidents were witnessed (n= 355, 61%), which is similar to other studies64 .Furthermore, an important number of violent events (n= 165, 28.3%) occurred in presence of minors, which is in agreement with previous research 65,66 . These children must be considered potential targets of protection and prevention measures because exposure to IPV during childhood increases the risk of being injured, of suffering serious psychological disturbance and also of becoming perpetrators or victims of that situations of IPV against women also affect children who are considered direct or indirect victims of this violence.…”

A medicolegal study of domestic violence in south region of Jordan

“…Child maltreatment commonly accompanies domestic violence and the rates of co-occurrence range from 30% to 60% (Kelleher et al 2006). …”

“…Domestic violence was ranked first type among various types of violence (Faramarzi et al 2005 ). Child maltreatment commonly accompanies domestic violence and the rates of co-occurrence range from 30% to 60% (Kelleher et al 2006 ).…”

Domestic violence as child maltreatment: Differential risks and outcomes among cases referred to child welfare agencies for domestic violence exposure

“…It is worth noting that this is a limitation of the NSCAW II as a whole, not just of this study. The NSCAW II data are weighted to be representative of the national child welfare population, even though there are considerable variations in child welfare practices and policies at state, regional, and local levels (Berrick, 2012;Kelleher et al, 2006). As such, any aggregate finding from the NSCAW II may reflect very little about what one could expect to find in any given CPS agency.…”